Feature highlight: How to set up an Online Booking Form

Manually capturing and processing enquiries coming through over the phone, via email or through Facebook can be time consuming, distracting, and prone to error.

Last year we released a couple of great features to help businesses generate and capture enquiries, then streamline the process of converting these enquiries into quotes and work orders: the Online Booking Form Add-on, and the Online Booking SMS Extension.

Online Booking Form

The button takes customers to sleek online booking page for your business, through which they can enter their details to request a quote or booking:

Customers can also add supporting photos and documents as attachments.

The form automatically uses your business’s logo, works on any device, and you can customise the placeholder text under ‘How can we help?’ to prompt the details you want.

All enquiries and requests will arrive in your ServiceM8 Inbox, where you can instantly convert the enquiry to a job. All info provided by the customer is auto-filled into the job card, and any attachments saved to the job diary:

Once in your Inbox, enquiries can be converted into jobs.

Adding the online booking form is a fast and easy business improvement you can ‘set and forget’:

It’s another way potential customers can initiate contact with your business – great for those that prefer to research and initiate contact online;

It’s a straightforward ‘pro-forma’ contact form you can refer potential customers to if they want to proceed to request a quote or booking; and

It’s a great bridge for converting ‘soft’ enquiries into work for your business.

The Online Booking Form add-on is free to activate and use. Check out these help articles for more info and setup instructions:

SMS Extension

The SMS Extension of the Online Booking Form is a beautifully simple solution to an issue many field service workers face when fielding phone calls from potential customers: having to drop everything to take down the customer’s details, or worse, telling the customer that they’ll get back to them.

With the Online Booking SMS Extension, when the call is winding up, you can simply tell the caller that you’ll text them an online booking form straight away, through which they can fill out their own contact and job details.

Customers simply follow the link to your online booking form.

Once you hang up, with a few taps you can text the last caller a link to your online booking form – the customer enters their own details and you can get straight back to what you were doing before the call:

Select the last caller and tap ‘Send Booking Text’.

If needed, you can opt to have the enquiry or booking automatically created as an Urgent Job and assigned to yourself as soon as the form is submitted by the customer:

Add to your preset SMS template if needed, and select whether to self-allocate the job.

Setting up the SMS Extension on iPhone takes literally five taps – from there, it will:

Save your field staff time by minimising interruptions and allowing them to return to focusing on the job at hand;

Avoid mistakes – the customer enters their own details and the enquiry is immediately captured once submitted; and

Provide a smooth and professional method of turning phone enquiries into jobs.

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6 Comments

How can we change the button to use our own company font/style “request booking” button instead of the green ServiceM8 button?

Michael
January 28, 2017, 10:22 am

Hi Clinton!

The feature doesn’t include a way of designing your own button within your ServiceM8 dashboard – sorry!

So, customising the design of your button comes down to how you manage your website:

DIY website

If you manage it yourself through a DIY website design & hosting service, you should be able to create a button (with your desired font/style) in your website editor, and attach a URL link to this button.

The URL link you want can be found on the same page as the HTML code in your dashboard (go to Settings > Online Booking, and it’s under the words “Your ServiceM8 Online Booking link is”. This is a unique link to your ServiceM8 account’s online booking form webpage.

Website managed by others

If your website is managed by a web designer or IT specialist, you can either design the button image yourself and provide it to them, or ask them to design it for you.

Your site manager can then insert the button into your website. Provide them with both your unique online booking form URL, and one of the HTML snippets (which they’d need to edit), and they can decide which way to make the button work from there.

Facebook lets you add a “Call to Action” button to your business page – we recommend using the “Book Now” button. Enter your business’s unique Online Booking Form URL as part of the button setup process, and the button will take customers to your separate Online Booking Form webpage.

Unfortunately no, this feature doesn’t include an ability to design your own custom booking form within your ServiceM8 dashboard.

However, you can customize the placeholder text under the ‘How can we help?’ heading, to prompt some further particular details you might want customers to provide. To do this in your ServiceM8 dashboard, go to Settings > Preferences, select ‘Quotes & Estimates’ in the left-hand pane, and edit the text in the ‘Job Description Placeholder’ field.

Depending what you’re after, you could also consider a form builder solution like Wufoo, and use the ServiceM8 Inbox feature to convert the email form submissions to jobs. Check out this help article.

Or, you could build your own form through your website editor, or whoever manages your website, and again use the ServiceM8 Inbox feature. Read about ServiceM8 Inbox here.